


Consequences

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, compulsive behaviors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 09:37:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19903618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "Over the years, jack has formulated several methods to keep himself sane. One of them is to have a very strict personal schedule, even if he claims to just be “snowballs and funtimes”. By personal, i mean when he eats, bathes, sleeps, stuff like that. Hes very lenient with his “work” schedule, but if he misses a time for his personal time he either gets really fidgety and os in a bad mood for the rest of the day, or he will punish himself by not doing whatever he missed for a week. One of the guardians (north preferably ) discovers this and tries to find him a more healthy habitL"I wrote the part where North finds out–he thinks Jack has been acting oddly because he’s been living at the Pole, which doesn’t have normal daylight cycles, and finds out what the prompt outlines, instead.





	Consequences

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 5/23/2016.

“It will not hurt my feelings if you have found out you do not like living at the Pole,” North says one morning, as Jack wanders through the kitchen, looking through cupboards and pantries and apparently finding nothing to his satisfaction. North knows his kitchen doesn’t tend to fail when presented with a problem it can solve, so it’s a good bet that Jack’s antsy-ness isn’t due to him not being able to find his favorite kind of bread, or anything like that.  
  
“What!” Jack whirls around. “No! North, I love living here, it was incredible that you would offer me a place to stay, and for as long as I needed, and, no, it’s great, it’s wonderful, I’m sure you hear that a lot, I mean—”  
  
North takes a sip from his mug of heavily sweetened coffee while waiting for Jack to finish. “I was not asking if you were grateful,” he says, after Jack has fallen silent and made an unfocused attempt to start making peppermint tea. “I was letting you know that if you have found that this is not the right place for you to live, that is all right. I know that when others visit they do not always find constant day or constant night to be easy to sleep and wake with.”  
  
Jack blinks at North. “That’s it!” His eyes are wide and there’s a faint smile of relief on his face. “I hadn’t even thought about that throwing me off, and since I never knew when I’d be by a clock before, I based so much on dawn and sunset and noon according to the sun…” He shakes his head. “I never thought it could make that much of a difference, the changes in a few minutes day by day, and so I had no idea why I was doing everything right but it felt just a little bit off, not a full miss so I didn’t have a reason to avoid that thing and do the reset, but not right enough that I felt good about going on.” He turns back to North. “Would it be possible for me to get a clock that shows me the position of the sun in the sky over Burgess? I think that would solve everything.”  
  
“Well, this would not be a difficult thing to make,” North says, “and I do rather like the idea of it. But what are you meaning by these misses and resets and rights and wrongs? You cannot be speaking of what you do as a Guardian; I have heard only good things of this.”  
  
“Oh, it all has to do with the things I started doing to make sure I always paid attention to time passing and that I didn’t stop being human,” Jack says. He fills a kettle with water and sets it to boil, while measuring out a scoop of peppermint into a tea ball. “You probably won’t think it’s a big deal, but I think it really helped me, you know? I set times for when I eat, when I sleep, when I bathe, those kind of human things. And if I miss then I have to show myself how bad things could get if I keep doing that, so I don’t do the thing I missed for a week. That adds some difficulty to it, too, because marking off seven days when you’re not around other people is tricky.”  
  
North puts down his coffee and walks over to where Jack waits for the water to boil. “Jack, have you ever thought that you don’t need to worry about that kind of thing, now that you have us Guardians and your believers to talk to? Or, should I say, now that you have much more to fill your time?”  
  
Jack shrugs. “I think it does me good, you know. And it keeps me engaged with the world. I’m still alone pretty frequently.”  
  
“Let me put it this way, then,” North says. “Even though, as a Guardian, you do not technically need to do human things like eat or sleep, I do not think denying yourself these things, because you think you have made some mistake, is good at all. It worries me that you take what is a little failure, and give it much larger consequences. What will happen if something much more serious occurs? In regard to genuine failure, it is much better to see what can be done to try again, not to be punished. This may be vital for Guardian work, you know? We had to prepare Easter after Sandy died, and we had to do it right away.” North pauses. “It would have been better if we had been able to believe that you had not betrayed us with Pitch, too. It is lucky that our reaction to Pitch’s drawing you down into his lair did not end in disaster.”  
  
“So you think following a familiar voice into a dark hole in the ground was a mistake?” Jack asks.  
  
North sighs, but when he looks at Jack he can tell that the question isn’t supposed to be taken too seriously. “Actually, I do,” he says. “But it need not have caused the extent of the problems it did. Do you see?”  
  
Jack holds onto the tea ball’s small chain and pours hot water over it, then pulls the tea ball back and forth in the mug. “I can see it for Guardian work,” Jack says. “And I can see it for myself—sort of. It depends on me only thinking about it. What I feel about what I do…the consequences seem like they would be terrible if I stopped. This is…there are a lot of really old habits, here.”  
  
“I only ask that we try to end the ones that are part of you thinking you should be hurt,” North says.  
  
Jack smiles a little. “All right. Then…I think I really will want to stay at the Pole, now.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Tags and Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> #now can everyone on the kinkmeme please go find a qualified therapist please
> 
> bowlingforgerbils said: what is up with these prompts??? I like how you described everything, I can picture North and Jack in the kitchen and it’s a nice image. :)
> 
> zinfandelli said: ahahaha you are right, a bunch of the prompts are pretty…coping mechanism-y. this is a take on it i’ve never seen before so yeah. interesting. wildly unhealthy, christ jack.


End file.
